Linux News: Ubuntu Zombies

Statistics is probably the best way to lie, but lies make you wondering…

Linux distros are free products that are not for selling on shelves. Thus there is not a market, so there is no market share. It is a trend share more likely.

It is hard to estimate how many Linux boxes are out there -speaking about Desktop. Statistics shows 1%-5% of all computers run Linux. An average would be 3%. This can be true, this can be false, but it doesn’t really matter a lot as it is low number anyway. What really matters is the growth of Linux.

Following again some statistics @ w3schools and hitlinks we see a constant growth rate of ~0.06 a year, from 2004 till the end of 2011.

I wasn’t able to populate Ubuntu’s trend share among other Linux distributions but my guess is that is somewhere around 60%, or maybe a bit more. I might be wrong, but this number is huge anyway considering there are 100+ distros.

Ubuntu’s growth trend share is superior to the overall Linux growth trend share. Also the Linux trend share growth rate hasn’t changed since the appearance of Ubuntu. It is still at ~0.06%. That leads to the conclusion that Ubuntu actually didn’t bring any new users to Linux Desktop, it just stole users from other Distros.